


Immolate

by remiges



Series: Drowning Days [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 21:31:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9922928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remiges/pseuds/remiges
Summary: Sam wakes up and it isn't a dream—not the endless highways or the adrenaline crash, the recoil shivering through his bones. But it isn't his reality now, either. The sun rises east and sets west, and somehow Sam's made it to the future.





	

Sam wakes up and it isn't a dream—not the endless highways or the adrenaline crash, the recoil shivering through his bones. But it isn't his reality now, either. The sun rises east and sets west, and somehow Sam's made it to the future.

It still feels like he's dreaming, though. Not every day, but sometimes, just when the sun burns red above the horizon, or he catches a glimpse of sleek metal out of the corner of his eye, or it rains from the west and the sound taps its way inside his bones, or—

Or.

Sam used to meticulously sharpen his knives, like he could hack himself out of the life he'd been born into if he got the blade to bite deep enough. The urge to get out had burrowed under his skin like gravel in a closed-over wound, like the pebble he'd had in his elbow from learning how to ride a bike.

(Dean had stolen McMillan's red five-speed— _borrowed it_ , he'd told Sam, holding the handlebars. _Come on, you're not a baby anymore. Get on, I'll teach you—_ and nearly a decade later, Sam had scraped his arm raw getting thrown by a poltergeist. The bit of gravel came out gray and chalky, like a piece of bone he'd misplaced, slipping wetly out of his grip and bouncing off the grungy carpet of their latest motel room.)

Leaving, Sam thinks, is the same sensation, the same feeling of blood dripping off his fingers, the same pain lurking in his back teeth, begging him to bite down.

He's wanted this since he knew what to wish for.

 

* * *

 

Sam starts yelling first, or maybe John does, but they're standing in the cramped kitchenette flinging _duty_ and _trust_ and _responsibility_ at each other, the words echoing off the linoleum. It's Dean who brings up family, but that's always been a four-letter word for Sam, the kind that sits heavy under his tongue and chokes him, wraps its curved edges around his throat when he's not paying attention.

Sam knows all about the ties that bind. Love took his mother, and love of hunting takes their father, and Dean, well. Sam doesn't see how Dean can view love as anything other than leaving.

Dean drives him to the Greyhound station, probably because he knows that otherwise Sam will just hitchhike. It's quiet in the car, suffocatingly so, and Sam turns on the radio just to do something with his hands. The volume is too loud, but neither of them reaches for the knob. The bass seem to vibrate along with the ringing in Sam's ears, and he swears he can feel the reverberations against his skin, brushing over the throbbing swell of his cheek.

Not staying isn't the same as never having been, he tells himself as all the home he's ever known claps him on the back and gets back in the Impala. It's not the same at all, but it dwindles anyway, blurred into the grime of the Greyhound window until the bus turns a corner and picks up speed.

 

* * *

 

Even after unpacking his duffle, even after orientation week, even after the first semester, Sam doesn't call. He's busy—first with the classes, then with the people, and somehow the time slips through his fingers, so quickly he doesn't notice the passage. Or, at least that's what he tells himself.

He can feel the distance between him and that car, that burnished black shadow drifting through his dreams, but it's never there when he turns around. He still reads the newspaper, but it's become habit to just skim the headlines and skip the classifieds, the police blotter, any column that's smaller than three inches.

Sam buys used textbooks and a five-subject notebook, revels in the way the paper crisps against his fingers, and doesn't salt the door or the window, not even under the carpet where his roommate won't see.

He goes to parties and overpriced coffee shops, fails his second calc exam, does laundry in machines that don't take quarters, figures out which study carrel is the best, gets a job in IT helping people in one of the computer labs, eats curly fries at one a.m. with the rest of his floor, runs too much and works too much and thinks too much about things he can't change.

He doesn't call, but Dean doesn't either.

 

* * *

 

Bradley introduces them at one of the too-loud parties he drags Sam to, some fraternity thing in one of the row houses. Sam's watching a game of flip cup and half-heartedly drinking cheap beer, waiting until it's been long enough for him to leave. College parties, Sam has come to realize, aren't more impressive than high school ones.

He has a distinct sense-memory of an arm slung over his shoulder, and drains the rest of his beer to distract himself.

She walks over with Bradley—or rather, elbows her way through the congestion—and clicks the rim of her solo cup against his own. She's beautiful, Sam notices, and doesn't pay attention when Bradley excuses himself. He tries to catch her name, but there's another group filtering through the door, bringing the chill with them, and over the music and the shouted greetings, he can't make out more than every third word. He can hear her laugh, though, and he's feeling reckless.

She takes him back to her dorm, and they have fumbling sex on her too-small twin bed, the springs creaking while voices drift in from the window that overlooks the parking lot. Sam can almost hear a voice in his head, telling him that he's never done casual, but he ignores it. Everything is different now, isn't it? And then he quits thinking for a while.

She grins at him when it's all over, reaches over the side of the bed to fumble for something in the pocket of her discarded jeans, flicks her underwear off her ankle, and pulls her cami down from where it had ridden up to expose her belly button.

"This was fun," she says, unwrapping a piece of gum and popping it in her mouth. She offers Sam one, too. "I'll see you around, yeah? My roommate's going to be back soon, but you're cool."

She, Sam thinks as he walks through the darkness, has no idea what his name is either. He thinks it should bother him more.

 

* * *

 

Jess, he learns the next time he looks at his phone, her contact information still open. Her name is Jess.

 

* * *

 

They start dating, or maybe fucking on the regular, Sam isn't sure, but it's good. Whatever it is, it's good.

Jess always carries a lighter with her—in her purse, in her pocket, in the pouch of her backpack—and Sam's fingers itch like they've been burned when he's around them, like a junkie reaching for something he knows he has to live without.

It's three weeks before Sam realizes he's never seen her smoke.

 _Hunter?_ he thinks, and _Here? Here where it was supposed to be safe?_ He watches her for cigarette breaks, can't smell anything lingering on her clothes, her mop of hair. Starts wondering if he's been chasing the past after all.

His dreams that night are a strange mix of images and reality, the pieces of the day shaken and rearranged. When Sam wakes up he feels, for the first time since he got here, that his past and his future didn't branch off at a Greyhound station in Fort Worth. Like if he just reached over and dialed, he could have Dean here in a day, two at most, depending on where he was.

He wants the brush of the sun curving along metal, the heft of a gun in his hands, and Sam breathes out for one infinitely long moment, imagines that on the next inhale it'll be Marlboros and leather. That if he opens his eyes and lifts his hands, palms pressed out, he'll see a burnished ring, a scar from a shifter hunt, fingernails bitten to the quick. Maybe his body won't be his own but Dean's, moving along the same grooves that were trained into his own.

Sam inhales, and it's the faint scent of weed from the next room over, the busted bag from the vacuum, the lingering smell of Jess' shampoo on his pillow. The dream finishes breaking into fragments, and still Sam doesn't open his eyes.

 

* * *

 

Here's what Sam knows about Jess:

She's from Kentucky, but her accent only really comes out when she's drunk. She likes tequila and linear algebra, how the burn feels going down and how the numbers align in space. She loves cherry tomatoes and country music, abstract art and cussing in inappropriate places.

She grew up in a house with yellow trim, burgundy shutters, gables and turned railings and a wrap-around porch. She has two sisters, but Sam has never heard her talk about her parents, not even in vague anecdotes like he manages to choke out. She drinks more than she should, never raises her voice when they fight but always aims below the belt, and leaves her hair clogging the drain. She can be cruel, sometimes, but she's not the only one.

Normal, he thinks as he watches her get ready for class, tugging on her shoes and pulling one of his flannels over the shirt she'd worn to bed. She applies her lipstick with a deft touch and kisses him on the cheek before she kicks him out so she can lock up. Normal.

Sam thinks about the lighters. He tells himself he's imagining it. He tells himself there's an explanation hidden in plain sight. He tells himself, not here. It couldn't have followed me here. Not this life.

 

* * *

 

Here's what Sam doesn't know:

He doesn't know how she got the cigarette burns arrayed across her hips in no discernible pattern. He doesn't know what to do with the rage that rises when he looks at them, though he does know that she wouldn't thank him for it. He doesn't know what to do with it when she tells him that she put them there herself, or what to do when his hands land on them during sex.

Honestly, there's a lot Sam doesn’t know.

Jess doesn't care, not for his discomfort and not for his pity.

"I don't need you feeling sorry for me," she tells him. "I liked being the one in control. I don't do it anymore." She's got a lighter in her hand, but the flame is still waiting to breathe. "Not that there aren't things to be scared of," she continues, "but I don't think this is one of them."

His relief from the revelation—that their monsters aren't the same after all—swells until he chokes on it.

 

* * *

 

Sam tells her about Dean. Or rather, he tries to tell her about Dean. He always starts, "My brother," and stalls out before he can get to their prank wars or diner antics, their stupid fights and the way he'd reset dislocated bones, eaten the pickles off Dean's burgers. How Jess would have tried to drink Dean under a table. He wants to say that he doesn't regret it, any of it, but somehow the words never come out right. They stick in his throat until he has to cough them out or simply stop breathing, and when they do come out, the narrative isn't quite as coherent, as detailed, as _vital_ as Sam needs. But still, he tells it.

He gives her everything he can, everything but the truth—the Truth, he calls it in his head, like substituting in a capital can absolve him from everything he's keeping back. He tells himself it's because she's been hurt before, that she deserves her chance at normalcy, just like he does. That she deserves any peace of mind he can give her.

He tells himself that so much that he almost starts to believe it.

 

* * *

 

Out of the two of them, Jess has always been stronger.

 

* * *

 

Sam is invited to talk about the translation work he'd done with a visiting professor, and Jess opens a bottle of red when he tells her the news. They talk about the future that night, sitting against the headboard of their bed and passing a bag of Kisses back and forth, wine glasses discarded on Jess' nightstand.

"A picket fence," Jess muses. "Maybe a kid or two. Possibly a suburb?" Her grin is a flash of white in the twilight. "Maybe not that," she confides in Sam. "God, we would kill them," and Sam thinks, despite all evidence to the contrary, that she's probably right.

A month later while he's standing on-stage at the symposium, the lighting dim enough that he can see everyone in the audience, Sam's hands don't shake. It feels like they should, like something this enormous should move him to the core, but he's grounded by the solidity of the podium under his hands, of Jess' face in the second row. For once in his life, he feels like he's in total control of this moment.

His voice comes out strong and deep, and he hears his father in his tone, Dean in his closing, and he can't hear his heart against the clapping of the audience as the next speaker exchanges positions with him. Jess is beaming at him, and he reaches over to grab her hand before he sits down.

That night, everything tastes like gold and dust, like the last chain to his past has just been cut, and with Jess' hand on his elbow, Sam can feel his future unfurling—every inch, every mile, every minute.

Maybe he's trading lives. Maybe in some alternate universe there's blood in his teeth and a blade in his hand, but in this one, he feels like he's finally come home. For everything now, there's a difference he can make later, law school just around the corner, and surely, surely it's worth it.

 

* * *

 

Sam usually doesn't remember his dreams, not unless they're the kind with blood and gore slicking his fingers, dead eyes staring at him out of bleached faces, the gunfire-crack of bones breaking over screaming. He's usually not armed and he's always running, but they blur and dissipate when he wakes. The only things left behind are impressions and murmurs, nothing solid. Nothing that he can fight.

These new dreams are different, though. Clear enough that it always takes him a minute to figure out what's real, even in the quiet cool of their bedroom.

He decides to stop drinking smoothies before bed, and tells himself it'll help. For all that Sam knows monsters exist, they shouldn't exist here, in the apartment with their names on the lease, their socks cohabiting in the too-small dresser. Sam has made a life here. It's one of absence—Dean and his trash talking, the fog rising off the fields, leather and gun oil and the grit in his palms—but he made it. They made it.

Sam kicks his feet free from the quilt Jess' grandmother made, swipes his sweaty hair out of his face, and rolls away from the blistering heat of his nightmare, rolls towards Jess and towards normalcy, and waits for the morning to set itself in motion.

Freedom, Sam thinks, is always hard to learn, hard to hold on to. He traces Jess' tangled hair with his eyes, the scars on her hip with his finger, and thinks about their missing pieces, the ones they'd abandoned to save themselves. Thinks they've made themselves into a different kind of whole.

 

* * *

 

Sam wakes up, and there's a twister in their living room.

He's smirking, pressing a knee into Sam's kidney, teeth reflecting the muted light from the window, and it's been so long since Sam's seen Dean that he can't make the reality fit for a long, poised moment.

It's been… well. Sam won't do the thing where people count out the time, but he feels the urge for it. Old cemeteries are full of graves like that—aged 41 years, 3 months, 21 days—like the desire to parcel out the minutes is instinctual. He just knows it's been too long and not enough, all at once.

And then Dean is standing and pulling him up, his grip the same, patting Sam on the shoulders like it hasn't been years since they've spoken, like he just dropped by on a whim, and it's not that Sam doesn't want him here, but he _doesn't want him here_. He can almost hear the building creaking, ready for whatever chaos Dean's brought with him.

And then Jess is in the room, and Dean's looking at her like she's something to be owned, like she's nothing more than a great rack and a good time. The tangle of emotions Sam has been dealing with ever since he recognized his brother, suddenly it's not so tangled anymore.

And then Dean says, "Dad," and Sam thought he was ready for this, but he was wrong. The word is like a physical blow, nothing to brace against, and he feels his future, that hard-won freedom, waver.

 

* * *

 

Dean tells him, "Kinda like riding a bike, isn't it?" when they're outside listening to the recording Dad left, but here's the thing. The by-now faded scar that Sam had worn on his elbow for years, the bit of rock wedged under his skin? None of that had been Dean.

With the Impala a dark gleam in the night, dragging him back over a decade, Sam can't help but remember that Dean hadn't let him crash. Not when he was tilting on McMillan's red five-speed, not when he hit the brakes for the front tire instead of the back and almost went head-first onto the pavement, not when Dean tripped over a pothole and nearly sent them both into someone's side yard.

No, the impact happened later, the steepest hill in town, just Sam and the wind and the view and the pressing urge to get _out, out_. Dad had been gone for a couple of weeks by that point, and Sam had a backpack full of canned food—little ravioli squares and creamed corn and fruit cocktail Dean had stolen from the middle school's canning drive—and he hadn't paused when he reached the summit.

He still remembers his frantic heartbeat, the sweat clinging to his back, his gasping breaths as he forced his way against gravity, the inexorable pull of the hill.

The road bent after the first drop, and Sam, overburdened and so overjoyed he felt nauseous with it, didn't have a chance to correct for the extra weight of his provisions before everything was in tumble, teeth biting through his lip, his body a burning skid on the yellow line while the bike clattered to its side. He'd lain there, the horizon at a disconcerting tilt, his skin raw and stinging against the air, and tried to figure out if he could still make it, even as the bruises from where the cans had impacted began to bloom.

It was nearly nightfall by the time Dean, riding another no-doubt-borrowed bike, found him walking alongside the ditch and towed Sam home on his handlebars, shouldering the backpack and pedaling too fast even on the uphill. Dean was all concern and badly concealed fear, but Sam didn't have to look at him as Dean ranted.

Sam kept his mouth shut. He knew he would never to be able to find the words to put it all together in Dean's head, how this felt, not even if Dean were willing to listen to him. His tears were hot against the wind, but he didn't dare release his grip on the handlebars to wipe them off.

The next time he tried to run, he didn't leave a note.

Pulled back to the present, Sam tells Dean, "I have to get back first thing Monday," and tries not to feel like he's betraying something. He reminds himself he did it, he got out, and that won't change. It doesn't help as much as it should.

 

* * *

 

After the Woman in White and crashing the Impala and nearly getting his heart ripped out, they make it back to Stanford in one piece.

He doesn't think Dean looks back as he drives away. Sam watches, but it's dark enough that he guesses he'll never know for sure. The light above the security grating throws a lattice of shadows before him, and Sam doesn't think about it. He doesn't think about a lot of things. He just fumbles for the key and he doesn't look behind him, not even after the purr of the engine has faded into the past.

The smell of diesel has always been a type of homecoming for Sam, but this is his life now. It's not a replacement for everything he left behind, but it no longer feels like he's hemorrhaging every time he moves.

Sam unlocks the door to his apartment, _their_ apartment, and brushes off the siren call of the road. In a couple months, maybe a year, this will fade into memory, nothing more than a blur of adrenaline and the tang of gunpowder when his brother haunts his dreams.

He closes the door behind him, and waits for his life to realign.

 

* * *

 

He's choking, struggling, air searing his lungs, and he can't see, can't _see._ Eyes fixed on Jess, where Jess had been, _Jess_ her hair going up in tendrils, body enveloped, and Sam too far away, tripping over his own feet as Dean drags him back, vision blurring, reaching, reaching—

It's not enough.

He's burned bodies before, but they've always been dead, ripe sometimes with bloat and gas, but nothing like this, nothing like the immolation of the living. Dean's shoving him, but it feels far away, muted, and the smoke rolls down like a curtain over her, and Sam, he… he…

He wakes up.

He wakes up.

He wakes up and wakes up and wakeupwakeup _wakeup, Sam, wake up—_

Sam wakes up, and the world is nothing like he imagined when he was younger. The sun rises east and sets west, and the highway is littered with futures, the road choked with them.

It's not a dream, no matter how many times he squeeze his eyes shut until the lights starburst behind them, no matter how many times he opens them to the expanse of the road and the miles dragging him further from California and from Jess and from the future they'd built together. It's all crumbled into ash and lies, and Sam can't breathe for their weight.

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out with me on [tumblr!](https://enter-remiges.tumblr.com/)


End file.
